I didn’t get reader’s block, but I did feel at times that I wasn’t writing enough that was special about the women. As I became more connected to the women, I wished I was writing more emotionally and more colorfully so they could come to life more, but that was not the book I was meant to write.

My favorite underappreciated novel is probably Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, not because of the novel itself but because it made me love reading at a time in my life when I was easily distracted by teenage things. I reread it not long ago, and there was a lot in there that I didn’t remember, probably because it wasn’t salient when I was twelve, but the memory of how I felt when I first read it was still there. I could read when I was three, so I have strong feelings about the joy of reading. I even recall being frustrated when we ran out of books for me to read in my house before I was old enough to go to school. By the time I started kindergarten, I was a very good reader, so the teacher would put me in charge of the class and have me read to them while she went to meetings or had to see the principal. At a young age, I learned that I was important because I could read, so I was always drawn to books, but that changed when I went to law school and became an attorney. There is so much mandatory reading that reading in general was not as fun anymore. I still find that my lawyer brain stilts my writing brain, and I am working to untangle things because I would like to write another book, probably fiction, so I can work on creative writing.

My biggest complaint about writing this book is that I suffered a fair amount of lower back pain because I forced myself to complete certain tasks by a certain deadline, even if that meant sitting for eight hours. I do not recommend sitting for eight hours.

I think the first book that made me cry was The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnen Rawlings. I don’t recall the specifics, but I do have a strong memory of the fawn being killed and feeling devastated. I’m more apt to cry at movies these days.

I edited a few bits out of the chapter on Denise Scott Brown, because she asked me to. I had a few strong sentences that explained how she was more talented than her husband, but she was so modest, and she really loved her husband and thought the world of him, and he felt the same way about her. She didn’t want me to describe her as better in any way, so I respected that and changed the text.

The hardest chapter to write was the one about Ada Harris, because I just couldn’t find anything. She invented the hair straightener and even got a patent, but nobody would buy it, so she gave up and became a community activist. She did not complain when two men later got credit for inventing the hair straightener. If she had, there might have been more stories out there about how she felt when her product did not sell and she was left out of the history pages, but she was a humble woman who found joy in serving others. What little I found on Ada makes me think she had a lot more to say—and it would have been important for us to hear her.

Aside from Greek mythology, my favorite childhood book is Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead by William Du Bois. I just love the theme of a kid being too lazy to get up in the morning and go to school, so he lives in a house where everything is done for him—while he’s sound asleep! I tried to buy it for my children, but it was long out of print, so I borrowed a copy from the library and made a copy of the whole thing at a Staples store so we could have it forever. I’m sure it was illegal, so don’t tell anyone.

If I could change the past to become a better writer today, I would never have gone to law school. I enjoyed creative writing in college, and I was pretty good at it—but my writing brain was kidnapped in law school. Descriptive and emotional terms are not allowed in law—just the facts, ma’am. It got so that I would actually feel anxious if I used an emotional word in a brief. Even as a trial attorney, I was trained not to address the jury in an emotional way or the case might be overturned on appeal. Yet so many of the cases I prosecuted deserved emotional energy. It was unnatural but necessary, so I ended up with a very different brain than the one I used in creative writing classes in college.

Writing energizes and exhausts me. I can write a lot when I feel I have something to say, but I find it unbearably exhausting when I don’t have anything to say. Editing, on the other hand, is always torture, because I have to slow myself down to read as objectively as possible, and though I know I have to do it because it will get better, it drives me crazy when I think I’ve done a final edit, and then I read it again the next day and see that I was wrong. I am never going to read something I wrote and not think it could be better. I just have to accept that about myself.